Power Apps - Zero to canvas

Unlock the power of app building with Microsoft Power Apps, no coding skills required! In this step-by-step tutorial, we'll guide you through creating your first app, all you need is an idea. With the assistance of the Power Apps Copilot, you'll navigate the process smoothly and effectively. Let's turn your ideas into reality and make your workflow more efficient.

In this first lab, we step you through getting your environment ready for the rest of the labs. First, you need a new environment, a developer environment is perfect. From there you will import our Happy Tails solution. Even if you completed our zero-to-model course, we want you to start fresh and use this solution. The labs were created with this in mind. And then finally we help you get set up with sample data. The more sample data you create to go along with our data import, the better. We provide pictures of some of our favorite pups, feel free to use your own.

In this lab we start building your canvas app. First you create your new app in a solution, then you create three screens. The first screen is your main page, the second screen is for a report for the day and the third screen is for writing up a story for the weekly newsletter, Waggles. We will be adding logic and automation in the remaining labs. Canvas apps allow for loads of creativity. As you build out using our instructions, think of ways that you might want it to visually appear, then circle back after the logic and automation labs to try out some additional visual elements that don’t change the logic but might improve the user experience.

Now that we have the screens we need, it’s time to add some logic. In order to do that we have to make a view in Dataverse to use. We offload this logic to Dataverse instead of creating the query in the Power App. Once we have the view we need we start to build out more logic. We add logic to update the visit record, logic to relate dogs that play together. Then we add new post records for our newsletter and then we finish with the relationship between all the pets and the stories we’ve made.

In this automation lab we use cloud flows to close out our story for Happy Tails and the canvas pp. This automation helps give the customers value from the user actions in the canvas app. The first cloud flow builds and delivers a daily email with info about the visit from the notes made in the canvas app. The second one is a bit more difficult and takes all our posts and crafts a weekly newsletter called Waggles, that goes to all our Happy Tails families every week.